North Devon Council Chooses Local Gov Drupal

In December of 2022, North Devon Council contacted Code Enigma on G-Cloud 13 , after being recommended by a previous client, South Hams.
North Devon wanted to migrate their council website from Umbraco to a framework that would better suit the site’s purpose.
G-Cloud 13 is a government regulated commissioning service, specifically for government bodies looking for companies to build or manage software.

Although they didn’t stipulate Drupal as the migration framework at the start of the project, after reviewing the services Local Gov Drupal distro offers, they agreed to a thirty day free trial. They found that it suited their intended purpose for the website, and Code Enigma began to work on migrating the site to LGD distro in March 2023.

North Devon is a county located in the south west of England, and is known for its coastal attractions. The area has a population of just under 100,000, with the primary industry being tourism, making its public appearance very important.

LGD Distro is a Drupal distribution service, specifically created by UK council webmasters for other UK council sites. It’s intended to reduce both time and cost of a project, while keeping a high standard of quality. It’s used by nearly fifty councils in the UK, as well as by a handful of other related communities.
Using LGD distro saved time and money for both parties, allowing for a smoother workflow and development pipeline. Code Enigma didn’t have to build a framework from scratch and North Devon was able to dictate what features they wanted with more ease and clarity.

Code Enigma often builds the framework for a clients website from the ground up, to the clients specifications. While this allows each site to be tailor made for their specific purposes, and thus perform better than editing a set template, it takes longer than using a template would. North Devon’s website already being public allowed Code Enigma to better work with the council, as they already had an existing example for the idea of the finished product.

Thanks to using North Devon’s original site as a template, Code Enigma’s dev team were able to spend longer working on the front end of the site on aspects like modifications and aesthetics. Code Enigma finished the website after only a few months, with it going live in October 2023.

Modules

North Devon requested a number of specific extra modules for their website. These included Google Analytics, Tag manager, Silktide (a tool that helps with testing) and Two-Factor Authentication (TFA).

A Senior Dev at Code Enigma, Phil Norton, helped with this process by creating and contributing a new module called Node RSS.

This module allows the RSS version of a node page to be displayed. It does this by automatically appending /rss to the end of the path to the page, which allows external systems to easily examine the target page by switching to the RSS version.

Front end and Cookies

North Devon requested help with customising the front end of the website. In particular, they wanted the landing pages and the homepage customised, along with a custom header and a footer across the website. They also wanted a full WCAG 2.2 compliant cookie banner as their cookie manager.

The North Devon webpage has a number of cookie services and individual cookies. A few of which are third-party cookies, from embeds in the site itself, such as YouTube videos and Twitter posts. All of them are compliant under the WCAG 2.2 accessibility standard.

WCAG 2.2 is the most recent version of the web content accessibility guidelines, updated in October of 2023. It is the minimum accessibility standard that all online public UK government services are required to adhere to.

Workflow Support

Code Enigma provided advice and training at the clients request, on any development and deployment tools, including providing a deployment workflow to the client.

Code Enigma has open source deployment and provisioning systems, called ce-deploy and ce-provision respectively. These systems allow them to build and deploy the client's site, in this case North Devon, to the specifics they requested. Changes can then be deployed through these tools easily and safely.

The webmaster at North Devon had never worked with Drupal before, and as such, with the new website using LGD distro they received in-house training from one of Code Enigma’s senior developers. This training took the form of a two week sprint, made to compensate for knowledge gaps the webmaster had in regards to the new framework.

The sprint consisted of working through a backlog of issues from the product owner, utilising them as additional practical training for the webmaster. By the end of the two weeks, the webmaster had a good understanding of the software and was able to use it in a self-sufficient and capable manner.
The sprints were very productive, with daily scrums, as well as benefiting from regular live chats and screen shares with the North Devon webmaster.

Migration

During the migration, Code Enigma used the Drupal migrate modules to transfer the website from Umbraco to LGD distro. While this process worked for the majority of the site, some sections had to be done manually.
A custom built migration script, along with a CSV export of the original site, was used by a CE dev to generate the needed content that the Drupal migration modules were unable to.

Ongoing Support

Code Enigma now provides a number of ongoing support services to the North Devon council on a planned, regular, monthly basis. These include:
 

• Five hours every month of ‘Ask Me Anything support’, specifically for break/fix situations, but extendable to more varied scenarios.
• One day every month of planned retainer services, where the webmaster is able to have the full day with a developer, addressing backlog issues.
• Support with hosting the site, including a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of uptime allowance, as well as a minimum response time for when a problem appears.

Hosting

Code Enigma also hosts the development, user acceptance test, and production versions of the sites on Amazon Web Service (AWS).

The ce-provision and ce-deploy systems are used to allow configuration, and deployment of updates, to the site to occur smoothly, should they be necessary.

Code Enigma also takes care of the site backups, manages the site networks, as well as having two  open source dedicated alert systems.
Prometheus and StatusCake are used to try and prevent and stop site downtime as much as possible in different ways.

Prometheus is an early warning system, and is used for preventative down time. Prometheus monitors the hardware of the servers for cpu spikes, {memory filling} and other advance warning indicators for problems that could cause site downtime. Code Enigma developers can then work to counter the emerging problems before they cause the site to go down.

StatusCake is used for reactive down time. When the site goes down unexpectedly, it sends out an alert, which is then acted upon by the Code Enigma developers. Code Enigma developers can use the data from StatusCake to identify the problem far faster than they could otherwise.

Both of these services are used to monitor and adapt the site as necessary, keeping it up as long as possible with minimal downtime.